The Nightingale-H2020 project for wireless acute care (UK/EU)

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/nightingale.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]Susanne Woodman of BRE, our Eye on Tenders, is following the Nightingale-H2020 project for acute care–and if you are in the wireless or wearable remote monitoring business, you should be too. It is a pre-commercial procurement project (PCP) that invites the European healthcare industry to develop wireless solutions for patient in-hospital and home monitoring. Deriving from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 grant, the process started last year with a €5 million award and in the spring had two Open Market Consultation meetings. Q&As from these meetings were recently released. The official tender will be released this November on the EU website Tenders Electronic Daily (TED). For more information, consult the Nightingale PCP website and their useful PDF on the process. @Nightingale_EU

ATA trend #1: Is a sustainable RPM infrastructure fact or fiction?

Guest columnist Dr Vikrum (Sunny) Malhotra attended ATA 2015 last week. This is the first of three articles on his observations on trends and companies to watch.

The advancement of remote patient monitoring is a visible trend from the American Telemedicine Association’s 2015 meeting, with care moving from the doctor’s office and being shifted to the patient’s home. A more diverse range of data is being collected for patients to facilitate more informed decision making at the patient visit and after the patient is away from the practice. As information is being collected and monitored on a more comprehensive basis, we have seen creative modalities to view a broad array of data points that would typically have been collected in a doctor’s office with the hopes of early diagnosis and preventive care, versus reactive care.

Patient autonomy has now come to the forefront and network infrastructure is being built to support that shift. Wearables, implantables and home based lab/ urine diagnostic kits are becoming smaller, cheaper, less invasive, wireless and cloud-based so that patients can be monitored without interfering in day to day living. (more…)

Simplifying engagement in diabetes management

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Livongo.jpg” thumb_width=”180″ /]Launched at TechCrunch’s Disrupt SF 2014 was a new wireless glucometer, Livongo Health’s InTouch. A M2M palm-sized cellular glucometer, it transmits not only conventional blood glucose readings from test strips, but also activity information (steps) and how you’re feeling. The user also sets it up for who looks at the data and what they see. Data goes to what they term a ‘smart cloud’ (a/k/a data platform) which reviews it based on clinical rules and accumulated personal health history. It is also backed by a virtual care team of certified diabetes educators. Founder Glen Tullman, who was quoted extensively in our well-read Patients should be less engaged, not more, has an FDA clearance in hand, (more…)

FCC sharply elbows up to the mHealth regulatory table

That other three-letter agency, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which has shown a distinctly competitive face versus the FDA on Federal healthcare tech policy over the past three years and more, has formed–drum roll–a task force to examine adoption of wireless technologies by health care organizations. Connect2HealthFCC will “identify regulatory barriers and incentives to expand the use of wireless health technologies; and strengthen partnerships with stakeholders in the telehealth and mobile health industries.” If this an accurate statement of the task force’s purpose, the parade not only has gone by, but it’s also three counties away. Yet going back in our files, this Editor notes that the FCC has vigorously fenced not only with the FDA, but also with HHSNIH, NIST and Congress for its place in the Federal HIT regulatory firmament. With issues such as ‘net neutrality’, wireless bandwidth and rural broadband, the FCC has a heaping healthcare helping on its plate just in assuring national access and removing conflicts in frequency demands by devices. However, the task force is headed by Michele Ellison, lately the FCC’s top regulatory enforcer with, as The Hill notes, 6,000 actions under her belt. In Foggy Bottom, things are never what they seem. iHealthBeat